Sara Paretsky - Total Recall

Mr. Contreras was feeling lonely and neglected, as was I. Even though I was exhausted, after giving the dogs a short run around the block, I joined the old man in his cluttered kitchen. He was drinking grappa; I opted for chamomile tea with a shot of brandy. The enamel on the kitchen table was chipped, the only picture was a calendar from the Humane Society showing a bundle of puppies, the brandy was young and raw, but I felt more at ease here than in the Rossys’ ornate drawing room.

“Morrell take off today?” the old man asked. “I could kind of tell you was feeling blue. Everything okay?”

I grunted noncommittally, then found myself telling him in detail about coming on Fepple’s body, about the Sommers family, the missing money, the missing documents, and tonight’s dinner party. He was annoyed that I hadn’t told him sooner about Fepple-“after all, doll, you was in the kitchen with me when his murder come on the news”-but he let me get on with my tale after only a perfunctory grumble.

“I’m tired. I’m not thinking clearly. But it seemed to me tonight’s dinner was a carefully orchestrated event,” I said. “At the time I got swept along on the conversational tide, but now I feel as though they were herding me, corralling me into talking about something very specific, but whether it was finding Fepple’s body or what I’d seen in the Sommers file I don’t know.”

“Maybe both,” my neighbor suggested. “You say this gal in the claims department, her name was in the agent’s computer, but she’s saying she never was near the place. Maybe she was. Maybe she was down there after he got shot and she’s scared to admit it.”

I slid Peppy’s silky ears through my fingers. “That’s possible. If that were the case I can see Ralph Devereux being protective of her-but I have to confess, I can’t see that it would matter much to Rossy or his wife. Not enough for them to invite me to dinner to pump me. He said it was because his wife was lonely and wanted me to talk Italian to her, but she was surrounded by friends, or sycophants at any rate, and she didn’t need me, except to get information from.”

I frowned, thinking it over. “The news of Fepple’s body must have come in, so Rossy could have called to see how much I know-but I can’t see why. Unless the company is more worried about this Sommers claim than they’re admitting-which means it’s the tip of some ugly iceberg that I’m not seeing.

“It was such a last-minute invitation-I wonder whether tonight’s cast of characters was already in place or if the Rossys pulled them together on the spot, knowing they’d play along. Especially Laura Bugatti-she’s the wife of the Italian cultural attaché. Her job was to be the excited ingenue.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She was the breathless airhead who could ask crude questions without seeming to know what she was doing. Although that could be her real personality. The truth is, they all made me feel big and crude, even the American who was there, some very acidulated writer. I hope I’ve never spent money on any of her books. It’s almost like I was invited to be the entertainment. There was a show going on which I was starring in, but I was the only one who hadn’t seen the script.”

“Whether money buys happiness or not I couldn’t say, but one thing I’ve known for years, cookie, and that’s that money sure don’t buy character. Which you’ve got ten times more of than any set of got-rocks who want to invite you to dinner just so they can jerk you around.”

I kissed his cheek and got up: I was too bleary-eyed to think, let alone talk. Moving almost as stiffly as the old man, I went upstairs to bed, taking Peppy with me: both of us needed extra petting tonight.

The message light on my home machine was flashing. I was so exhausted I thought I’d let it go, but then I wondered if Morrell had tried to reach me. The first message was indeed from him, missing me, loving me, bone-tired but too excited to sleep. “Me, too,” I muttered, replaying his voice several times.

The second message was from my answering service. Amy Blount had called, twice: “She’s angry and insisting that you get in touch with her at once but wouldn’t give details.” Amy Blount? Oh, yes, the young woman who’d written a hundred fifty years of Ajax history.

At once. Not now, though. Not at one in the morning on a day that had started twenty hours ago. I switched off my phone, shed my suit, and tumbled into bed without taking off the camisole or my mother’s diamond drop earrings.

For the first time in over a week I slept through the night, finally staggering out of bed when Peppy nosed me awake a little after eight. My right ear hurt from where my mother’s earring had pressed into it in my sleep; the left one was lost in the bedding. I fumbled around until I found it and got both of them back in my safe, next to my gun. Diamonds from my mother, handguns from my father. Perhaps Fillida Rossy’s writer friend could turn that into a poem.

While I’d been sleeping, my answering service and Mary Louise had both left messages saying that Amy Blount had again demanded to speak to me. I groaned and went to the kitchen to make coffee.

I sat on the back porch nursing a double espresso while Peppy sniffed around the yard, until I felt awake enough to stretch out my stiff joints. Finally, after doing a full workout-including a fast four miles over to the lake and back, with the dogs protesting at the speed I made them go-I reconnected myself to the outside world.

I reached Christie Weddington at my answering service. “Vic, Mary Louise has been trying to reach you, along with a bunch of other people. Amy Blount called again, and someone named Margaret Sommers.”

Margaret Sommers. My client’s wife who thought I was out to rob or maim her husband. I took the details of my messages and told Christie she could switch urgent calls over to my cell phone. I wandered into the kitchen with my portable phone, prepared to make breakfast while talking to Margaret Sommers. I called her office, where they told me she’d gone home for a family emergency. I went back to the living room to get the home number from my Palm Pilot.

She answered on the first ring, shouting at me, “What did you say to the police about Isaiah?”

“Nothing.” The unexpected attack took me off-guard. “What’s happened to him?”

“You’re lying, aren’t you? They came and got him this morning, right out of the Docherty Works. In front of his buddies and everything, saying he had to talk to them about Howard Fepple. Now who but you would have turned them on to my husband?”

I wished I’d stayed in bed. “Mrs. Sommers. I have not discussed your husband with the police. And I know nothing about what happened this morning. If you want to talk to me about it, start at the beginning, without hurling accusations at me: is he under arrest? Or just brought into the station for questioning?”

She was angry and upset, but she did her best to choke back her invective. Isaiah had called her from work to say the cops were taking him in for Fepple’s murder. She didn’t know the station number but it was the one at Twenty-ninth and Prairie, because she’d rushed up there but they hadn’t let her see Isaiah.

“Did you talk to any of the detectives who are questioning him? Can you give me their names?”

There were two, whose names she’d managed to get even though they were acting like God Almighty, not having to tell her anything.

I didn’t recognize either of them. “Did they tell you anything? Like why they brought your husband in to begin with?”

“Oh, they were so mean, I could kill them myself and not think twice about it. Treating me like it was all a big joke. ‘You want to stick around and yell at us, honey, we could lock you up right next to him. Listen to you two make up lies together.’ Those were their very words.”